Although web components are still on the bleeding edge—barely supported in modern browsers—the technology is also moving extremely fast. This practical guide gets you up to speed on the concepts underlying W3C’s emerging standard and shows you how to build custom, reusable HTML5 Web Components.

Regardless of your experience with libraries such as jQuery and Polymer, this book teaches JavaScript developers the DOM manipulations these libraries perform. You’ll learn how to build a basic widget with vanilla JavaScript and then convert it into a web component that’s semantic, declarative, encapsulated, consumable, and maintainable. With custom components, the Web can finally fulfill its potential as a natively extensible application platform. This book gets you in at the right time.

Jarrod Overson

Jarrod has been developing on the web for over 15 years in both startups and global companies and currently works at Shape Security. He founded Gossamer to help bootstrap companies into developing for the modern web and has provided free community training on everything from node to backbone. Jarrod is an active proponent and contributor to open source, creator of Plato, and a member of the Grunt, Marionette, and ES-Analysis teams.

Jason Strimpel

Jason Strimpel is a Staff Software Engineer on the platform team at WalmartLabs who specializes in the UI layer. Jason has been building web applications for the past 12 years. Approximately 3 years ago Jason began specializing in the front-end, in particular JavaScript. Since then Jason has worked with several component libraries and frameworks. However, Jason found limitations to these libraries when presented with uniquely challenging UI requirements, so he began developing his own custom components and catalog of helpers. He is an extremely passionate developer with a very bad sense of humor who loves simplifying the complexities that arise when building rich UIs.

The animals on the cover of Developing Web Components are horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus), also called scad. A species of jack mackerel in the family Carangidae, this fish is found primarily in the northeastern Atlantic and in the Mediterranean Sea.

The horse mackerel matures rapidly during the first few years of life and grows more slowly thereafter, commonly reaching between 15 and 40 centimeters in length. It has a metallic grayish-blue body with green tints, anchored by a large head and a forked tail. The fish’s distinguishing marks include a black blotch on the edge of its gill covers. Its strong fins make it a fast, powerful swimmer; its common name derives from a legend that smaller fish could ride on its back like a horse.

The horse mackerel’s diet mainly consists of small fish, crustaceans, and squid. Young horse mackerel have been known to shelter underneath large jellyfish, as they are immune to their venomous sting. These juveniles enjoy the dual benefit of evading predators—such as large tuna and dolphins—and garnering food remains from the jelly’s prey.